MARRY, BANG, KILL

by Andrew Battershill

53

  Tommy had improved a little but was still sick enough to slump forward as he walked or tried to focus on things.

  Eventually, he managed to wrestle a granola bar and a decent amount of water down his throat. Then he spent a good while sitting in a nice ray of sun between the trees, warming himself and realizing, abstractly, that being sick was actually kind of helpful. He felt far away from himself but as a result focused on the world a few inches away from his head, and for the first time in what felt like a long time, he wasn’t completely terrified. He was just sick.

  And it was in this comfortable and oddly emotionless state that Tommy watched Mousey emerge from the bush, weaving erratically towards him before tripping on a root, and in trying to right himself, falling oddly and flatly backwards. Tommy stayed staring at the empty space above where Mousey had fallen for a few seconds before securing his sleeping bag around his shoulders and slouching over to help him up.

  By the time he got to sitting up, Mousey was already babbling, reaching a weak, fading hand towards Tommy’s shoulder. “Hey, man, it’s shit. It’s shit, sorry. I forgot your bag. I forgot your bag and your stuff, and the list, the list, the list I made for you, buddy. I just, just forgot it. It’s bad. I forgot it. It’s bad. It’s so bad.”

  Tommy reached down, held Mousey’s face with his left hand and slapped the other side with his right. “How does it feel?”

  Mousey was about a day and a half’s rest away from remembering the reference; instead he just sat there, swaying softly forwards and back, looking physically numb and emotionally hurt. Tommy reached down and pulled Mousey up as hard as he could, barely getting the guy off the ground before Mousey remembered that he had legs and started to help with the process. They both stood there a second, hunched over and breathing heavily. After he got his breath back, Tommy consciously straightened before he spoke.

  “This is my business. This is on me. So I’m telling you we’re going to go back to your house, I’m going to put you to bed, pick up the bag. No big deal that you forgot it. And I’ll drive myself to the pickup. That’s happening.”

  Mousey shook his head loosely. “It’s, it’s . . . I gotta take you, I have to make sure.”

  Tommy took a firmer hold of the detective’s shoulder and shook him quiet. “Mousey, man, I appreciate everything you did. You saved my life. I don’t know why, but you did and really thanks. Really. But now you need to go to bed, and I need to drive myself to this meeting.”

  Mousey seemed to totally gather himself for one porcelain-fragile moment. His words came out less mumbled than they did when he was sober, even. He said: “Sometimes I have an intrusive thought where I just remember how powerful milk propaganda was in the nineties . . .” And then he stopped and just swayed a little more, so Tommy started guiding them, staggering but at a reasonable pace, towards the road to Mousey’s car.

  At the glass house, he dropped Mousey on the floor by the front door and then went to look for the bag, which was on the kitchen counter. Tommy opened it, took out the daytime cold medication, and grabbed himself some water from the kitchen. It took three pills and about six tries before he could swallow one pill properly. Somehow they kept getting caught up in his throat, like his body’s swallowing muscles were on strike. But eventually he choked it down, resettled himself, and looked up the directions to the meeting spot on Mousey’s iPad.

  Mousey was asleep beside the door when Tommy got back downstairs, so instead of waking him up and having to carry him to bed, which he doubted he’d have the strength to do anyways, Tommy went to the bedroom and grabbed two pillows and a blanket. He rolled Mousey on his side, tucked one pillow under his head and the other behind him to keep him from rolling onto his back, and spread the blanket over him, right there beside the door. Then Tommy took the time to write a short thank-you note before he left.

  Driving helped Tommy wake up even more, and he was able to carry himself pretty much upright as he met the boatman, even holding a nice conversation with the guy as he politely deferred shaking hands to avoid spreading the fever around. Tommy only got back to his sick-self after he’d been settled in the boat for a while, tucked low in the back, looking at the island from almost exactly sea level. He knew that he was the one moving, and in spite of the bumps and the feel of speed from under him, Tommy somehow still couldn’t help getting the impression that he was still, and it was the island that was moving away from him, so he looked down.

  He took to staring at the wake of the boat. The water that kept spreading out in two hard, white peaks, like a mountain getting cut in half, before loosening back into liquid.

  54

  Greta waited out the normal period of time for the other people in the hotel to wake up, worry, and then decide that the shots had been a car backfiring and go back to using their phones to geolocate the most wondrous views on the island. She drank a bunch of tap water in an effort to make her head stop spinning. Eventually, she went downstairs and drank coffee until she felt awake and steady enough to eat, then she ate, paid, and went to her car to get the bleach and plastic sheeting.

  There was no way she was getting the cop’s body out of the hotel. To do that she’d have to piece him up and carry him out over the course of about a week. He was a big boy. So instead she decided to bleach and wrap the body to control the smell and leave it in the tub. This was, actually, the first time Greta had been forced to conceal one of her own dead bodies. Before, it had always been a case of leaving them where they were, or dragging them to an inconspicuous spot and running.

  More than anything, manipulating the cop’s dead weight as she wrapped it reminded her of the so-called FIIT Farmer’s HIIT class she’d attended the previous spring. It had been a workout class held in a back alley, with the basic principle that labour tasks, like carrying a barrel, or pulling a heavy iron hoe with some ropes, were fundamentally more kinesthetically useful than specifically targeted muscle exercises. And to be fair, it had been an awesome workout, but somehow introducing the tools of real work and just having them scrape uselessly across concrete, accomplishing nothing other than yuppie fitness, really tugged at the already always tenuous edges of Greta’s tolerance for such classes. She still went to them, obsessively, as a way to keep herself balanced and not incredibly sad and dire all the time. But still. There are limits.

  Eventually, Greta managed to get the body wrapped up, and then she dumped a decent amount of bleach down the open top-end of the rolled-up sheeting, clear but showing its content, like a Vietnamese fresh roll. The bleach stung her eyes, so Greta retreated to the bedroom and carefully lined the base of the door with rolled-up towels. She slumped back onto the carpet and was almost immediately overcome with exhaustion and the nasty after-effects of all of Mousey’s sad drugs. She crawled to and up the bed, and fell asleep.

  As usually somehow happened when she woke up, Greta managed to forget that she’d killed someone. She got up and immediately took to pacing around the living room before noticing how profusely she was sweating, and she laughed as she re-entered the bathroom and saw that the source of her anxious sweat was also occupying the shower. She stripped and used the towels to dry off before replacing them under the door and finally changing her clothes. She loaded up her weapons, carefully checked that they were concealed, and fixed her hair into an extremely unattractive, ultra-tight topknot that she could feel pulling on her skin all the way down to her eyebrows. She put on some clear, large glasses with very dark and defined frames, then she packed up her things, went downstairs and extended her room rental by a week, and recklessly swerved her way to the ferry terminal.

  She would wait until she was at least two hours away before she called Sergei. She imagined Darillo flexing pliers for no reason, alone in an undecorated room.

  She was early to the ferry terminal and so was forced to sit, staring at the ocean, fuming. The thing that got to her, specifically, was how wrong Mousey was. He had a way that he thought it had all gone down, and what made Greta angry was not
that he’d gotten the best of her, but that he thought he knew why. He thought that snorting highballs and talking and hanging out on that edge that lets everyone feel like they could have gotten laid if one thing had gone differently was what she’d wanted. For herself. He thought the whole night, doing it that way, was anything at all but just easiest. And that was an impression Greta couldn’t stomach.

  She watched the ferry float into view, slowly drifting at a gentle angle towards the hard line of the dock. The hitman laughed, started her car, and peeled rubber back across the empty pedestrian walkway. She blew past the waving ferry workers in their fluorescent-highlighted vests, and floored it as soon as she hit the open road. Mousey’s assumption, his misinterpretation of the situation, was a thing she couldn’t, and didn’t, have to take. Eventually, she thought, you should stop just taking everything all the time.

  At first, Greta made the approach to Mousey’s house with extreme caution. Watching her angles, moving in from the treeline, making cautious darts between cover, until she could get a bead on the house. She pulled out her viewfinder and cased what was literally the most strategically vulnerable home she’d ever seen. All glass, mirrors behind the glass. She assessed the whole place from ten yards out, through the windows. He wasn’t in the house. She moved in closer, staying cautious until she finally saw the thin, meagre pile of him, slumped back against the rock. She couldn’t see his face, but she knew. There was no trap here. He’d played all the angles he had it in him to play. He was waiting. Not waiting to, not waiting for. Just sitting still.

  Greta relaxed her posture, letting the gun dangle loosely from her side as she walked up on him, even taking a second to crest the slight incline before she got to him so she could see the view he was seeing. He must have lit a cigarette or a joint, because she could see smoke rising and getting blown quickly away. She stayed stopped for a few more seconds, looking at the ocean, thinking about the space where she knew he was, but couldn’t see, before finally walking around the side of the rock to join him. No angles, no soft steps, just a nice, normal walk — her head tilted up enough to catch the green of trees in her periphery.

  “How are you feeling today, Mousey? All I can see from here is that you look like shit.”

  Mousey dropped the joint to his feet, and it somehow didn’t set the moss on fire. He didn’t look away from the view, just let a few words flop out of this mouth. “Well, y’know, I feel like shit. But I feel like one of those shits that feels just wonderful, after you drop it in the water.” Eyes pinned out, head bobbling loosely on his skinny, sucked-out neck. He looked ready to go, pleased with himself but just as pleased to put his head in an oven. “I thought maybe you’d hustle off the island. Grab the ferry. That was the smart play. Lowest risk, anyway.”

  “You really bet the farm on that?

  Mousey waved loosely at her with both hands, then he spread one arm out and let it drop, weakly gesturing at the trees around him. “What farm?”

  “Where’s Marlo?”

  Greta guessed that maybe a nineteenth-century Russian writer’s corpse would call what he did with his face right then a smile.

  “I’ll only tell you that if you can promise, promise, promise me you care about the answer.” For almost a minute, there was just trees and wind and the sound a gun makes when it’s not being used for anything in particular. “I didn’t think so. You got me, you got me. It’s all right, though. The only infinite thing in this world is the threads you can pull out of the bottom of cut-off jean shorts.” He awkwardly plucked a thread off the bottom of his shorts with his ring and middle finger, and let it get picked up and moved only slightly by the wind. “What I wanted to tell you about is hair. Right? You want to hear about hair? My dad was a barber. He was barber and he had this broom . . . And hair grows back, it always grows back, and all scissors do is rust and rust and rust . . .” He lost his train of thought, suddenly and totally. Let his voice trail off, and went quiet. In sharper times, Mousey had been quiet a lot, talking when he needed to, and enjoying talking, but listening more than anything.

  At that time of the afternoon, with the sun coming through the trees, the occasional pine-tinged wind blowing through the hot day, it was so nice on Mousey’s property. He took a deep breath and looked like he was about speak, he moved his head like he was speaking, gestured in a small way with his hand, the way people do when they have something to say.

  The whole thing, every single thing about the world around him, was so beautiful; it was almost as if Greta didn’t take a stride closer, cup his shoulder gently with the emptiness of her palm, put a gun against the back of his head, and fire it, leaving him faceless, down in the dirt.

  Acknowledgements

  The line “Lick me, Bear. Lick me,” is from possibly the greatest Canadian novel of all time: Bear by Marian Engel.

  Quadra Island is not technically a Gulf Island but rather a part of the Discovery Islands. Over the last couple decades, however, it has become common in British Columbia to include Quadra Island as part of the Northern Gulf Islands, along with Denman, Texada, Lasqueti, and Hornby.

  * * *

  As always, I’d like to thank everyone even remotely involved in making this book happen. But, to name a few, I’d like to thank my agent Adam Schear for finding this book a home and Bethany, Susanne, Peter, Jill, Martin, and Julie at Goose Lane for being that home.

  Many thanks to the Regina Public Library, whose support was essential for the completion of this book

  I’d also like to thank my friends, who are all very nice and fun and good people. I’d like to thank my family, who, in addition

  to being very nice and fun and good people, have been incredibly supportive of my writing, and, well, my whole life.

  Finally, I’d like to thank Zani — for the partnership.

  Andrew Battershill’s first novel, Pillow, was longlisted for the 2016 Scotiabank Giller Prize and the 2016 Sunburst Award and shortlisted for the 2016 Kobo Emerging Writer Award. Pillow was also selected by the Walrus as one of the Best Books of 2016 and by CBC Books as one of the Best Debuts of the year. Battershill is the co-founder and ­former fiction editor of Dragnet magazine.

  He is now the fiction editor of This Magazine.

  He lives in Vancouver and Quadra Island.

  Table of Contents

  Chapter 1 - Victoria, British Columbia

  Chapter 2 - Quadra Island, British Columbia

  Chapter 3 - Victoria, British Columbia

  Chapter 4 - Quadra Island, British Columbia

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6 - Victoria, British Columbia

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10 - Quadra Island, British Columbia

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12 - Victoria, British Columbia

  Chapter 13 - Quadra Island, British Columbia

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15 - Victoria, British Columbia

  Chapter 16 - Quadra Island, British Columbia

  Chapter 17 - Campbell River, British Columbia

  Chapter 18 - Quadra Island, British Columbia

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

&nbs
p; Chapter 51

  Chapter 52

  Chapter 53

  Chapter 54

  Acknowledgments

  Landmarks

  Chapter Cover

  Chapter Title Page

  Chapter Copyright Page

  Chapter Acknowledgments

  Chapter Contributors